Short COBOL a practical tool to reduce tedious programming procedures

Programmer productivity is one of the most serious problems of the data processing industry today. One way of improving productivity is to relieve the programmer from the tedious aspects of writing programs. An experiment has been performed to examine how much the programmer can shorten COBOL programs without losing the context. The results of the experiment indicate that one letter abbreviations of reserved words and user-defined words are possible by using careful assumptions.